This letter was sent to Susan Dickinson in autumn 1873 (THJ, RWF, Smith and Hart).
For a related fragment, see A 348 (about 1873 [THJ,
RWF]). This fair-copy fragment, possibly a compressed poem, appears to have been
composed before the letter in which it is embedded. Yet it is also possible that
the letter was composed first, and the lines later excerpted. The faultline
between prose and verse in the letter is not entirely clear—does prose
become verse in the line "Silence is all | we dread," as suggested in the present
encoding, or does prose become verse at an earlier or later point?—and
further ambiguates the temporal relationship between the fragment and the letter.